ABSTRACT
This volume offers a collection of new papers on a key theme in current historical archaeology: rural evolutions in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The period bridges the break-up and dispersal of Roman authority across much of the Mediterranean and European landscape and addresses the characterisation of farms, villages, rural exploitation and fortified sites resultant from the imposition or creation of new political and demographic powers and from related socio-economic changes. This volume is designed to span much of the old Roman world and to seek the variety of human landscapes that emerge between AD 350-750. We will be observing in these papers aspects of old and new, continuity and discontinuity, borrowings and impositions, as well as uncertainties and complexities.
